Interview: Duncan Fletcher | Sport | The Observer Search executive jobs Search all jobs Interview: Duncan Fletcher At 36, he left Zimbabwe with no job, no home and just £2,000 to support his family. Now he is hailed as the mastermind behind England's ashes win. So how did Duncan Fletcher get from a desk job in an engineering firm to being the world's best cricket coach? Xan Rice 'If this setback results in an honest appraisal of the situation, then I would say it was a blessing in disguise, but there is more chance of Zimbabwe winning a final than English cricket taking the necessary hard decisions.' Ian Chappell on England's shocking early exit as hosts from the 1999 World Cup He is a man. He wears a faded red golf shirt, black slacks and black shoes. He has large hands on meaty forearms and grey hair combed to the side over a jowly face that suggests a police superintendent. He stares through narrow blue-grey eyes and the deep lines that drop sharply down from the corners of his mouth make him look sullen, even when he is not.

Aged 57, he lives in a townhouse in one of the more affluent suburbs of Cape Town with his wife and an old Jack Russell called Emma. He likes to talk in the third person, likes to do things his way and if he was reincarnated he would like to be a rugby union fly-half. He has changed country, changed profession, and changed the fortunes of English cricket. This man is Duncan Fletcher. But who is he? When David Lloyd resigned as the national-team coach after the 1999 World Cup, the England and Wales Cricket Board (ECB) drew up a short list of successors: Dav Whatmore, coach of Lancashire, Jack Birkenshaw of Leicestershire and the favourite Bob Woolmer, an England batsman of the 1970s who had recently stepped down as South Africa coach. There was also Duncan Fletcher, of Glamorgan. Fletcher had never played Test cricket and, like Whatmore, an Australian of Sri Lankan parentage, he was not British. England had never had a foreign coach.

Writing in The Observer, Vic Marks said: ' If there is little to choose between the candidates, there is still something to be said for having an Englishman in charge of England.' But Fletcher had a superb record as a coach, he was direct and respected by the players with whom he had worked in Britain and in South Africa. By the time Fletcher arrived at the ECB for his interview, Woolmer had dropped out of the race. 'I went in and said I wanted to be in charge of the whole set up,' Fletcher recalls when we meet on a bright morning at his home. 'They had never had someone say that before. They had always had some past cricketer who would tour and be the manager. I was saying everyone reported to me. I wanted to be responsible for everything.' That afternoon, or the next morning - Fletcher cannot recall exactly when - his phone rang. It was the ECB offering him the job. 'I don't know if it was going in with that attitude that swayed them, but I probably impressed someone like Lord MacLaurin [the then ECB chairman ] who thought I was a guy with direction and a plan.' Fletcher is not an impulsive man. He asked for time to make his decision.

He thought hard about what the job, with its incessant travelling and media demands, would mean for his family. Steve James, the former Glamorgan opener who knows Fletcher as well as any player, says: 'This was a huge decision for him. Duncan is extremely devoted to his wife and kids. They always come first.' Fletcher was confident enough in his abilities as a coach, but was worried about the motivation of the squad he was to inherit. He had never even met most of England's senior players and what he was hearing on the county circuit was not good: Mike Atherton, Graham Thorpe and Alec Stewart were all meant to be difficult. Nasser Hussain even worse. But he took the job. 'You have to judge things for yourself,' he says, as if this were reason enough to be England coach. The timing was good: humiliated at home during the World Cup and in the process of losing a home Test series to New Zealand, England were a poor side. 'People were saying then that we were the worst team in the world, which was bullshit because we had beaten South Africa the summer before,' says Atherton.

'But things certainly weren't great.' One of Fletcher's first tasks was to help to select a squad to tour South Africa. There was a widespread and inevitable call for a cull of the older players. But Fletcher believes that a country is fortunate if it unearths a top -quality Test player every two or three years. He was adamant that Atherton, Stewart, Thorpe and Darren Gough should tour. There were newcomers, too, including Chris Adams, Darren Maddy, Graeme Swann, Chris Read, Gavin Hamilton and a certain Michael Vaughan. The tour began disastrously, with England losing their opening match against an invitation XI. From there, they proceeded to the Wanderers in Johannesburg for the first Test. On the first morning England were two runs for four wickets and were beaten by an innings. A mediocre series was lost 2-1, with the only win coming in the now discredited final Test, when the late Hansie Cronje made a generous declaration in return, it later emerged, for £5,000 and a leather jacket from a bookmaker. By the time England returned home, Fletcher understood the scale of the challenge.

Born on 27 September 1948 in what was then Salisbury, the capital of Rhodesia, Duncan Fletcher was the third of six children. The family home was a farm outside the city. At the age of six, Duncan was sent to board at the whites-only Prince Edward, one of the country's best-known boys' schools. Like each of his brothers, who all played first-team cricket, he excelled on the sports field; Fletcher's sister, Anne, captained Zimbabwe's hockey team to gold at the 1980 Olympics. Years later, in the school alumni magazine, Fletcher wrote that he was the only brother in the family not to be made a prefect. 'This must be unique in the history of Prince Edward school, for if you captained the first-team cricket or rugby, you were assured a head boy or deputy head boy position. So, I must have left my mark, being the only pupil to captain cricket and still remain one of the plebs.' After school, he served his mandatory year in the army, then joined the government valuations department as a property appraiser, before moving to the Treasury computer bureau.

His team were responsible for designing and implementing automated systems - from water-billing to car registrations. One of his duties was to help devise the country's vehicle number-plate system. When I asked him about this, he rather surprisingly embarked on a detailed explanation. 'The new format had to make it easier for witnesses of hit-and-run accidents to remember the number-plate. So we added an alpha character to the end of the existing six-digit sequential system. The letters I, O and U were excluded, as they could be misidentified, leaving 23 letters to play with. The computer divided the six-digit number by 23. The "remainder" would determine the letter; so a remainder of one would give you the letter A on the numberplate.' Simple. Away from work, Fletcher was establishing a reputation as a powerful cricketing all-rounder. The game was strong in Rhodesia in the early 1970s. The country had supplied players to the South Africa Test team such as the fielding great Colin Bland and the fine swing bowler Joe Partridge.

A team under the name Rhodesia competed in South Africa's domestic first-class tournament, featuring local players as well as imports such as the all-rounder Mike Procter, who represented South Africa before the apartheid ban, and Robin Jackman, who would later play for England. There was little prospect of a true Rhodesian national team competing at Test level, though, given the disturbed politics of the time . Named after Cecil John Rhodes, whose British South Africa Company had acquired huge gold-mining rights under a 1888 treaty, Rhodesia became a British colony under white rule in 1923. By the 1950s, however, the independence movement was gathering force. The British government had issued a directive that was known as 'Nibmar': no independence before majority African rule. This was meant to ensure that countries such as Rhodesia could not receive independence without introducing majority rule. The white Rhodesian government under Ian Smith considered this a betrayal and, in 1965, Smith issued the infamous unilateral declaration of independence (UDI), freeing the country from British rule and heralding 15 years of international sanctions.

Smith's decision would lead to a fierce guerrilla war (known as the bush war to the whites), led by two African liberation movements, Zanu, fronted by Robert Mugabe, who represented the majority Shona people, and the Zapu of Joshua Nkomo, a minority Matabele from the south, and financed by the Soviet Union, North Korea and China. Increasingly isolated and under severe economic pressure, Smith finally agreed to a form of majority rule in 1979. A year later, following a peace conference at Lancaster House in London, Zimbabwe-Rhodesia became plain Zimbabwe and Mugabe was the first freely elected black president. Having completed his initial six months' military service in 1968, Fletcher served as a sergeant in the Rhodesia army for three weeks each subsequent year until 1980, as the bush war raged. When I asked him about this, he would say only that he had served as a conscript, not a volunteer. On independence, a new national Zimbabwe side became an associate member of the International Cricket Council.

The team played in the World Cup for the first time in 1983, with Fletcher, then 34, the captain and coach of a squad made up mainly of club cricketers, including the 16-year-old Graeme Hick, plus the South Africa Test veteran John Traicos. After beating Pakistan in a warm-up match, Fletcher led his players against Australia at Nottingham. In a 60-over match, Zimbabwe scored 239 for six, with the captain hitting an undefeated 69. In reply, Australia scored only 226 for seven. Fletcher took four for 42 and the man-of-the-match award. It was one of the biggest upsets in cricket history. Kevin Curran, coach of the current troubled Zimbabwe team, made 27 batting with Fletcher and dismissed Allan Border. 'He was captain, coach, everything,' he says from his home in Harare. 'Duncan plays it down, but he was a quality all-rounder. He also had a great understanding of the game and was tactically and technically brilliant even then.' Curran remembers Fletcher's obsessive attention to fitness and fielding and his insistence on putting the team ahead of the individual.

'One day we were playing a touring county side. Duncan was on about 90 when he declared our innings closed. I thought he was crazy to do that and asked him why. He said, "The team comes first".' Here is a pale man in a black-ruled former colony. His cricket career is almost over. Does he join the 'chicken run' with all his relatives and tens of thousands of other whites in leaving Zimbabwe in search of a more secure future? (Today there are as few as 25,000 whites left in the country; there were about 70,000 when President Mugabe began his campaign to seize white-owned farms in 2000, and 260,000 in 1978.) Or does he stay to help build the new country? 'We were a close family,' Fletcher says. 'We used to pitch up at one of the brother's houses on the weekend, have a braaivleis [barbecue] and watch the kids play cricket on the big lawn. It was a tragedy [when the wider family began to emigrate]. Suddenly everyone was asking, "Where is this country going?

Is there a future for us here?" ' Fletcher and his wife, Marina, had two young children, Michael and Nicola. They wanted to stay, but he remembered how a falling out between Zambia's President Kenneth Kaunda and Ian Smith had led to the closure of the border between the two countries. He started to worry that the same thing could happen between Mugabe and the apartheid government in South Africa. If it did and things deteriorated, would he be able to get out? He was concerned, too, about the education system. 'Class sizes had jumped from 18 to 35 and teachers were leaving. I wanted my son, who was showing real academic ability, to have the chance to go to university one day. Degrees in Zimbabwe were not worth the paper they were written on. British universities were far too expensive and, while South Africa had good universities, Zimbabweans could not take their money out of the country.' When Fletcher dislocated his shoulder and discovered that the local hospital did not have a safety pin to hold the sling or, for that matter, even the sling itself, which he had to go out to buy, he made his decision to go.

'I did not want to leave but thought, "Right, better do it now".' Later, reflecting on the calamity that has since happened in Zimbabwe, he says: 'Look, I don't want to get into politics but you are concerned about the country you were born in. It worries me that so many people are getting hurt out there. I thought Zimbabwe was a fantastic country... and I think it can still be.' Fletcher was 36 when he moved with his family to South Africa, with only 4,000 rand (then worth £2,000) in his pocket. He found work in Cape Town as a dataprocessing manager with John Thompson Africa, a company that made industrial boilers, mainly for the sugar-cane industry. He soon moved to work for a subsidiary of Northern Engineering Industries, a British company that manufactured electrical turbines, and on again to Power Engineers, which made electrical transformers. There Fletcher was production control manager. Leon Harmsen, a 47-year-old Afrikaner who still works at the company as group human resources manager, remembers him as unusually committed. 'Whenever there was a cricket game on, we 'd all listen to the radio commentary at work,' he told me.

'But Duncan did not. It struck me as odd at the beginning, but later when I knew him better I realised where he was coming from. It was like, "I am here to do my job. I don't have time to listen to the radio".' His one escape from work was cricket. When Fletcher first arrived in South Africa, he needed extra money and so began to coach the University of Cape Town team. He moulded the squad into the best club side in the country. One of his charges was an 18-year-old Gary Kirsten, who would become one of South Africa's finest batsmen. He still regards Fletcher as a mentor. 'One day Duncan sat me down and said, "Do you think you can play for Western Province?" and I said, "Hell no",' he says now. 'He said I could do it, but needed to get my arse in gear. To have someone backing you like that is so important.' Fletcher's coaching success had brought him to the attention of Western Province, one of the traditional powerhouses of South African cricket. He was offered the job of director of cricket.

It would mean taking a salary cut but, for the second time in his life, he followed his instinct and embarked on a new life, and swiftly began to put his business experiences to use on the field. He approached Leon Harmsen and they discussed how players' personalities affected their roles in the teams. He asked Harmsen to conduct psychometric tests on the batsmen to find out where exactly they should bat. 'That's the kind of man he is,' Harmsen says. ' That's the depth he went into his cricket with.' Success at Western Province, where he nurtured Jacques Kallis and Herschelle Gibbs, led to the South Africa A job. During a tour of England, Glamorgan persuaded him to become coach for the 1997 season. 'At first, he did not say a lot,' says Steve James. 'He just wanted to observe and did not dive in. I thought that showed a strength of character - a lot of coaches feel they have to justify their positions.' Glamorgan promptly won the county championship for the first time for 28 years. More and more people were beginning to take notice of Duncan Fletcher. Here is a song.

It is by the Baha Men and the chorus is 'Who Let the Dogs Out?'. The song has become the unofficial anthem of the England tour of Pakistan in late 2000. In a Karachi dressing room, in the middle of a huddle of sweaty, exuberant England players who have just clinched the three-match series by winning the final Test, a man is barking wildly as the song plays. That man is Duncan Fletcher, the usually dour and inscrutable coach. You thought you knew him? Or maybe, if you listen to former captain and now Sky Sports commentator Nasser Hussain, he is even cannier than you realised. 'I think that [the barking] was his way of winning our trust early on, ' Hussain says. 'So to see him chanting and dancing up and down in a huddle wasn't as surprising as it would seem now.' One of the main lessons Fletcher took from the South Africa tour of 1999-2000, his first as coach, was that the selection process had to change. 'Everyone tended to look after themselves, perhaps rightly, because they did not know where they stood within the selection process.

You could be in and out of the team at any time. I realised then that selection had to be more intensive and investigative.' A top-quality Test team, Fletcher reasoned, needed a reliable opening pair who could consistently put on 100 for the first wicket, as well as a quality all-rounder. One player, in particular, interested him, a young batsman who had scored a superb century for Somerset on a turning pitch against Glamorgan in 1998. That player was Marcus Trescothick and Fletcher pushed his fellow selectors to give him a chance for England, even though he had struggled to establish himself properly at Somerset. Fletcher may not have known it then, but he had found one of the three players he was looking for. He wanted, too, to transform the way England prepared for matches. 'Preparation was still very amateurish, from the way the team used to pitch up for a Test match, to fitness levels, to working out the opposition. Because they were playing so much cricket, the players just pitched up and played. All that had to change.' As coach of Glamorgan, Fletcher had attracted attention - and even ridicule - for his end-of-play warm-down routines.

But Glamorgan were one of the fittest teams on the circuit and a side-effect - or rather, according to Fletcher, the primary motive - of the warm-downs was to forge team spirit. From his army days he had learnt that collective hardship breeds unity. Bringing military-inspired discipline to the England set up would never be easy, as Nasser Hussain explains. 'The only thing that Duncan and I tended to fall out on were small things like dress codes, how many High Commission functions we should attend and pre-match training. I was quite old school and couldn't see the point of getting to a ground at 7.30 in the morning for a 10.30 start and then spending the next few hours running round cones on the pitch. But he would say, "I've been to Arsenal, I've been to Manchester United. This is what they do and what we've got to do as well".' In 2000, England played West Indies at home. They lost the first Test, then conceded a 133-run lead in the first innings of the second Test, at Lord's.

Inspired by Andrew Caddick, who took five for 16, England dismissed West Indies for 54 in their second innings. England sneaked home by two wickets and went on to take the series 3-1. Had they lost at Lord's the revival in English cricket may never have happened, or at least would have been further delayed. Of all Fletcher's qualities, it is perhaps his sharp eye that the players speak of most highly - something that became apparent during England's surprising away series wins over Pakistan and Sri Lanka in 2000-01. Atherton says that it is far easier for a coach to destroy a player than improve him. 'And Duncan has made people better,' he adds. 'He does n 't force himself on players, but makes improvements over time.' On those tours of the subcontinent, Fletcher encouraged some of England's top batsmen to employ what he termed the forward press, which requires the player to take an initial step as the spinner releases the ball, ensuring he is light on his feet, and then deciding whether to move forward or back. Trescothick, Hussain, Thorpe and others have credited their success on those tours to the manoeuvre.

Fletcher was also instrumental in a decision that had a huge bearing on the future of one of the least heralded players in the England squad, left-arm spinner Ashley Giles, whom he encouraged to bowl over the wicket to right-handed batsmen, pitching the ball on or outside leg stump. Giles had used the technique before in one-day cricket, but in the longer version of the game it had always been considered as a negative tactic. Now, Fletcher is no tinkerman, but this was a theory he had been wondering about for nearly 30 years. As a left-handed batsman, he had always found it easier when an off-spinner bowled around the wicket to him. He did not believe the move was defensive; after all, Sri Lanka off-spinners Muttiah Muralitharan and Kumar Dharmasena had employed it to good effect against left-handers. 'By going over the wicket, the left-arm bowler is creating the spin by the angle he bowls at,' Fletcher says. 'Cricket is a game of angles and you have to understand geometry to appreciate this.' Fletcher approached Giles and Hussain with his theory. They agreed to try it.

'In Galle, Bob Cottam [then the England bowling coach] came to me and said, "What's this, Giles bowling over the wicket?",' Fletcher says, with a rare smile. Giles was widely criticised for this new tactic but, encouraged by Fletcher ('Stick with it, Gilo,' he would whisper, 'stick with it'), he continued to bowl over the wicket. In 2004, against New Zealand at Trent Bridge, Giles bowled a ball to Chris Cairns that pitched outside leg stump and clipped the top of the off-stump, outside Cairns's bat. A mini-miracle ball. Against Australia at Manchester in the third Test in August, he repeated the feat against Damien Martyn, a superb player of spin. Changes had taken place off the field as well, changes that Fletcher acknowledges played a significant part in England's resurgence. A national academy was set-up in 2001: the first intake included Andrew Flintoff, Ian Bell, Steve Harmison, Simon Jones, Andrew Strauss and Robert Key, with James Anderson and Kevin Pietersen soon following. Equally importantly, the ECB had finally copied Australia and South Africa by issuing central contracts to the top national players.

Fletcher could now decide when his charges were free to play for the counties and when they needed to rest. 'Before the late Nineties, the administrators did not realise that the national team had to be put before county cricket,' Mike Atherton says. 'So Fletcher was given the tools to do the job and he has made the best of those tools.' The contracted players enjoyed the opportunity to rest and, according to Hussain, to benefit from Fletcher's sharp eye. 'You'll find that a lot of the England batsmen will be quite happy to pull out of a county game if that means they can spend time with Fletcher. It will be much more productive.' The county chairmen were less impressed. Geoffrey Boycott has said that Fletcher had done more harm to county cricket than anyone else. When I put that to Fletcher, he replies, sharply: 'I don't want to discuss Boycott at all,' but then adds: 'It has taken people a lot of time to understand what I was trying to do. When I said I was going to pull a player from a game tomorrow, it's not because I'm thinking he will be tired the next day.

In May, I'm thinking of what may happen to my players in September.' The World Cup in South Africa in 2003 should have been a highlight for Fletcher; he was returning with England to his adopted home country, after all. Instead, it was a disaster, with the decision over whether to play a game in Zimbabwe causing a huge furore. England stayed away, in the end, and exited at the first stage - again. While this was a huge blow for Fletcher, he prefers instead to express his disappointment that England threw away a winning position against Australia at Port Elizabeth, which would have put the team through to the next round. While England have not looked back since the World Cup, Zimbabwe cricket has edged ever closer towards ruin. Last month, Tatenda Taibu, the team's courageous young black captain, was forced into hiding with his family after receiving threats believed to have come from political elements within the cricket hierarchy. Fletcher allows himself a single observation about Zimbabwe's attempts to make the team more racially representative.

'They have to be careful - it takes six months to build a house and only a few hours to knock it down.' After the World Cup, Hussain resigned as captain of the one-day side and during the summer stepped down from his Test role, too. He had forged a close understanding with Fletcher, who, for his part, says Hussain coped extremely well in an 'impossible job'. 'Nasser was quite reclusive and intense, but he had a great cricket brain. He was part of an era when the team were getting beaten regularly and he had to lift the side away from that.' Michael Vaughan was chosen as the new captain. Although a completely different character from Hussain, he immediately impressed Fletcher. 'Vaughan is quite outgoing and laid-back, but there is a toughness in him, which any good captain needs. He is pro-active and, while he has had good bowlers, he has managed them well.' The coach-captain relationship has been crucial to England's rise. While Fletcher insisted on control of the set up, he knew the players could have only one master: the captain. So Vaughan starts and finishes each team talk, with Fletcher in the background.

Fletcher the consultant, Vaughan the CEO, is how the coach describes it. He will not undermine the captain and will not permit anyone else to, either. To an outsider, Fletcher can easily come across as terse and guarded. He is certainly suspicious of the media. Indeed, Atherton says that many of Fletcher's current players do not know him that well. 'He keeps his own counsel and remains quite detached. He has a hard outer shell that is difficult to penetrate.' By nature he is shy, says Steve James, and he is not comfortable around those he does not know. Certainly in person he answers - or evades - questions dutifully and without emotion. When his dog farts during our conversation, Fletcher apologises on its behalf, then adds: 'You'll just have to bear with it.' And yet, you feel, he is unhappy with the popular image of him as a morose and stern man. 'I am accused of having no sense of humour,' he says. 'But if you ask any team that I have coached, you will find that they had a fantastic team spirit. Does this come from someone who walks around the dressing room spreading misery?' What makes him laugh? 'I don't know,' he says, sternly.

'What makes anyone laugh?' Graham Thorpe, in his autobiography, Rising from the Ashes, wrote of Fletcher: 'His public image was dour but there was a lot more to him than the public saw. He was always sensitive to how players were getting along as people.' I ask Fletcher about this. 'To man-manage people you have to be sensitive and understand how a player's feelings will affect the team. You have to understand people.' Hussain, who says it was important for Fletcher to be seen as a 'tough taskmaster' when the younger crop of players broke into the Test team, remembers the coach having harsh words with Trescothick, Andrew Flintoff and Steve Harmison early in their careers. 'The important thing is that they were always delivered behind closed doors, in a one-on-one situation, and he never lost his temper,' Hussain says. ' He's definitely got a Mourinho or Ferguson mentality about backing your players in public, even when you're worried about their form.' It is this loyalty that is at the heart of what Fletcher calls the 'bubble' that surrounds his team. 'It's about unity and camaraderie,' Fletcher says. 'You are all together, helping and supporting each other.

Any information we have stays in the bubble. Why just say things and let the opposition know what you're thinking?' Not for the first time, Fletcher uses an analogy to explain himself better. 'Look, the smallest unit in the world is the family. If you put your family on the lawn and played rugby, Jeez, you'd have some battles. But let someone criticise your brother who you've just been barneying with on the farm and you would want to fill the guy in. That's the family bubble. A cricket team need not be different.' The whole idea sounds rather fanciful until you recall a dramatic moment from a one-day international against Australia early in the summer. Simon Jones threw at the stumps but hit opener Matthew Hayden on the chest. As Hayden squared up to Jones, Strauss and Paul Collingwood rushed in to support the bowler. Brother defending one another. Before this summer's Ashes series England had not lost a Test series for nearly two years; the team had a settled look.

By the summer of 2004 Flintoff had emerged as a truly world-class performer; Trescothick, with a Test average in the mid-40s, was consistently excellent, and the emergence of Strauss had completed Fletcher's original wish list of a solid opening pair and a top all-rounder. England lost the first Ashes Test at Lord's by 239 runs, but Fletcher resisted the predictable call for team changes. He knew that he had the players to do the job and that he had the power to stick with them if he wanted. During the one-day series he had identified psychological and technical weaknesses within the Australia team. It had always been his intention 'to get under the Aussies' skins'. By the end of the fourth Test, when England had taken a 2-1 lead, both weaknesses had become pronounced. Some of Australia's best batsmen - Martyn, Hayden and Adam Gilchrist - were struggling for runs, while Ricky Ponting, the captain, had embarrassed himself with an astonishing outburst after being run out by the substitute fielder Gary Pratt. The main object of Ponting's ire was Fletcher.

This was the final confirmation that he had achieved what no other England player or coach had achieved in recent times: psychological dominance of the Australians. Fletcher acknowledges this, but refuses to elaborate. 'I want to keep our tactics in the bubble. We have to go to Australia in a year and it's going to be very difficult.' By the final morning of the fifth Test at The Oval, with England needing only to draw to secure a remarkable series victory, Fletcher was more nervous than at any other stage of his coaching career. 'It suddenly hit me on the Monday morning that everything boiled down to one day's cricket. It was difficult to be philosophical. Winning the Ashes was more important to us than winning even the World Cup.' England held out to win the series, as we all know, and while his players began their long drunken celebrations Fletcher was in bed by 10.30 that night. Two days later he was back home in Cape Town. Nicola, his daughter, had decorated the family home with Union Flags and a huge balloon in the shape of a superhero, with the word 'Coach' on its chest. The balloon is still there when we meet, but Fletcher does not want to be photographed with it.

When i next spoke to Fletcher, VIA email, England had lost the first Test in Pakistan and were struggling in the second. He played down the loss, preferring to point out that Flintoff had bowled well, taking eight wickets in a match for his best Test figures, and lauding Trescothick's superb 193. He did not mention Ian Bell, although he must have been pleased at the way the young batsman had played, especially as he was only drafted into the team when captain Michael Vaughan was injured. In Cape Town, Fletcher had talked about how the team could be improved. 'We have to find a quality number four, which is a very important position in Test cricket. Hopefully Bell can come through.' There was more evidence to back up that contention when Bell scored a century in the eventually drawn second Test, helping the side to avoid a large first-innings deficit. 'Otherwise the side is really balanced well. Our bowling attack has conventional swing, reverse swing, pace and bounce.

We have five bowlers who can take five wickets in an innings and all of them can play important roles for the next five or six years.' How does a straight-laced man such as Fletcher deal with the ego-driven character of Kevin Pietersen? 'If his image helps him perform, then fine. If you try to change that mindset and he does not perform then you have a problem. If it starts hurting the team's overall "persona", though, then you have to step in.' Of all the England players, it is a possible injury to Giles - who Fletcher greatly admires and insists has the ability to score a Test century - that worries him most. 'If any of the other players gets injured, we have guys that fill in for them in the short term. But if Gilo gets injured... well, he has simply got to stay fit for the next two or three years until we have found someone else.' But, given the amount of cricket on the international calendar, injuries will inevitably come. And just keeping the players focused outside the big series is going to be a challenge, Fletcher believes. 'To maintain intensity - which is crucial to the game - is becoming harder and harder.

If a young cricketer starts out at 21 or 22 and has kids - and then has to do all this travelling - it becomes ridiculous. I did not realise there would be so much time on the road. And people - especially in county cricket - don't seem to realise that even when we are playing in England, we are still on tour, still travelling, and away from home.' Despite his insistence that the Ashes is the ultimate prize, it is perhaps telling that Fletcher's three biggest disappointments have come in the one-day arena: the ICC final loss to West Indies last year, the 2003 World Cup loss to Australia in Port Elizabeth, and the NatWest Series final where India chased down 325 to win in 2002. Limited-overs cricket is the one area where Fletcher can be deemed to have failed. In 122 one-day internationals from January 2000 to November 2005, England have won 51 per cent of their games. Ignoring results against Zimbabwe, Bangladesh, Namibia and Netherlands, and the no-results, the win percentage drops to 36 per cent.

Australia, by the same measure, have won 74 per cent of their completed games. 'We are building a one-day side that is similar to our Test team and that's pretty exciting,' Fletcher says, somewhat defensively. 'We are not far away from being a good one-day side.' What Fletcher is looking for is another quality all-rounder or two, and a greater contribution from the tail. 'You have to bat deep and that is one area of concern for me. In a five-match series you can win two games batting down to seven or eight. But to win three or four matches, your nine, 10, 11 have to get effective runs. With sides like Pakistan, their bowlers can smack the ball over the rope with ease. That's what we want.' And here is a man who usually gets what he wants. · Xan Rice is a contributing editor of Observer Sport Monthly BBC SPORT | Cricket | International Teams | South Africa | England to face ex-coach Fletcher England to face ex-coach Fletcher Fletcher enjoyed a largely-successful six year spell as England coach Former England coach Duncan Fletcher will be part of South Africa's coaching staff when they play England in 2009.

Fletcher will begin his consultant role with South Africa in the forthcoming two-Test series against Bangladesh, which begins on Wednesday. He will be involved in the build-up to their Australia tour, and will take part in preparations for the Champions Trophy and England's tour in 2009. Fletcher's high point with England was the 2005 Ashes win over Australia. South Africa, currently third in the International Cricket Council's world Test rankings, start the first Test against Bangladesh at Bloemfontein, play the second a week later before flying to Australia for three Tests. Fletcher, who lives in Cape Town, will work with the team for three days before both Bangladesh Tests and then 12 days prior to the first Test against Australia in Perth on 17 December. "He will add a great deal of value to our plans and preparations, particularly with his experience of having been a successful coach against Australia," South Africa coach Mickey Arthur said of the appointment.

"I am a great believer in refreshing the squad, whether it be on the playing or management side, and he will help us find another 5% to take us up to the next level." Former Zimbabwe captain Fletcher became England coach in 1999 and left the post in 2007. His departure came in the wake of a disappointing World Cup campaign that ended at the Super Eight stage, and which followed Australia's 5-0 win on home soil to regain the Ashes. He has recently held talks with English county side Hampshire over a consultancy and advisory role there. Fletcher has previously worked as a coach for Western Province, where he helped launch the international careers of Jacques Kallis and Herschelle Gibbs. Bookmark with:

Question: For which country did ex England coach Duncan Fletcher play Test cricket
Answer: Zimbabwe